Event Details
Writer-director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique, 1955) adapted Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel for this intense thriller, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Yves Montand plays Mario, a playboy stuck in a remote South American town. Down on his luck, he joins three other desperate men in a death-defying task: driving two trucks loaded with nitroglycerine over treacherous mountain roads to put out an oil well fire. Bong Joon Ho told an interviewer in 2020 that this was one of two films he saw when he was nine that inspired him to become a film director; the other was Psycho (1960). William Friedkin remade the story in English in 1977 as Sorcerer... .
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
1953 | 155 min. | France, Italy | Black-and-White | French with English subtitles | Not Rated | 4K DCP
DIRECTED BY: Henri-Georges Clouzot
WRITTEN BY: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jérôme Géronimi
WITH: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli